Tournament Time!

Hey everybody!

It’s time for something a little different for today’s game day. On Saturday, I took part at the Summer 15 Netrunner Tournament at my local game shop, having apparently gotten a good number of people into the game locally.

All of you beautiful, long-time readers will no doubt know that I am not a competitive player in the slightest – which kinda makes it strange that I would even enter a tournament, but I’m trying out some new things, and aside from being a great way to play more games and meet people, it’s kinda nice to see what these things are all about, you know?

For those of you who don’t know the game, first of all I’d like to direct you to my previous blog!

Read that? It was great, wasn’t it? Right. So in a tournament, you basically play both Corp and Runner against the same person in 65 minutes, and score points for a victory – 2 for outright victory, 1 for a timed victory if your game takes too long. There were six people (including me) in the tournament, so we each got to play three games.

I was playing my tried and tested Shaper deck as the Runner – tried and tested, but not necessarily successful! Now, I have never played the Corporation, so while I know of the mechanics, I was essentially flying blind. I therefore used a pre-made deck for Haas/Bioroid, that from Creation and Control.

My first match was against a guy who has only been playing about three weeks, so we started with me playing the Corp while he played a Noise Anarch deck. We were pretty matched, as he stole agendas as often as I scored them, but unfortunately I lost as I couldn’t get my economy going and had too many agendas stolen before I could score the last one for the win. Bah! We then switched over, and I played my Shaper deck against his NBN deck. Oh man, I messed up on this one, and despite my Muresh Bodysuit preventing the first, I still took too much meat damage from neglecting my tags and flatlined. Bah!

So I was currently at 0, which was exactly where I expected to be at this point!

Second match, I started as the Corp again, against another Noise Anarch deck, which was one of the worst control decks I’ve ever played against in any card game ever! Imagine the worst kind of blue deck in Magic – it was like that. Of course, for the most part it was a delayed game which I was kinda okay with, as I was really struggling to get any sense of economy on the board, so was using up a lot of clicks to get my credits. For credits, and to purge virus counters, as they were a pain in my butt! Sheesh. Unfortunately, as we got to the late game, I started just leaking agendas, and while I had scored 5 agenda points, and came to within 4 advancement tokens of victory, I just suddenly lost again. Bah!

That game lasted for about 45 minutes – possibly longer, actually – so we had a very quick match where I once again flatlined, despite having again come quite close to victory by stealing agendas. Which was a pretty difficult thing to do, as I was once again up against NBN, this time the Haarpsichord Studios identity, which only allows one agenda to be stolen each turn. Each turn, people! Crikey! My Shaper deck kinda relies on accessing multiple cards from R&D, though obviously it didn’t get set up as my luck just stank on this day!

However, I want to give a shout out to Notoriety. Both matches as the Runner, I drew this in my opening hand, so while there was little to no ice on the board, I could run on Archives, R&D and HQ, then even if I didn’t access any agendas (which, shockingly, I didn’t), I could turn that card into a 1-point agenda. Nice! It really helped me in these games, so even though I didn’t win, I still managed to get a decent number of points on the board. Pretty good, I must say!

My final match was against the guy I introduced to the game back in May. I’ve played him a few times as he got to grips with the game, so was fairly confident in how his Jinteki deck would go after me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite prepared for just how much meat damage he threw at me with his identity card – having spent out my credits on my opening gambit, I had one card in hand, so he spent his entire turn to flip to The Brewery. Nasty!

I really had no hope of winning from the start, of course, but now things were really just silly! Final game, and it was once again over to the Corp, with my opponent playing a Noise Anarch deck. I had ridiculous bad luck with this game – my opening hand had just one piece of ice, and three agendas, which I hadn’t really thought in great detail. But he just ran on my hand three times and stole all three agendas, winning the necessary seven points to win. Both of these final games lasted just fifteen minutes in total – yep, just fifteen minutes!

We had another game after that, which I basically used as more practice playing the Corp, and which I also lost, but at least it could give me the practice and see what the deck I was playing lacked. Which was economy cards! There were just two different cards – two copies of each, but still just two cards – that allowed me to gain credits out of hand. The rest of them required the runner to make unsuccessful runs, but without enough money to rez all of the expensive ice, I couldn’t make this happen! Bah!

A guy from out of town won with a Noise Anarch deck, and Wayland Corp deck. I managed to watch some of his final game – you know, because my last two games ended so quickly – and it was a pretty insane game.

And I think this sums up a lot of the tournament thing for me. I’m not saying there’s anything bad about this sort of thing of course, but everywhere there was playing to win. I mean, it’s obvious, right? But I just don’t play like that. I mean, all of my decks are theme decks that, while good (even if I do say so myself!), they are more built for the theme, for the game to play, and winning is a secondary concern. Something else that kinda surprised me, seven games of Netrunner back-to-back – seven games of anything back-to-back really – were just too much for me. To be perfectly honest, I was done after the second game.

At any rate, it was a fun day, and good to play against other Corporations, but whether I make the effort for more tournaments in the future will remain to be seen!

What about you guys? Any interesting tournament stories? Have you been in this summer’s Netrunner event? Let me know in the comments!